Get a grip, Miguel: your nation needs you

By Boris Johnson

12:00AM GMT 30 Nov 2000

POOR old Polly. A brilliant journalist asks him: Mr Portillo, have you abandoned your plans to lead the Conservative Party? They might as well have asked him when he had stopped beating his wife. What on earth do you say? If you say yes, it's finito with me, I'm a busted flush, everybody immediately responds with Batemanesque amazement. Good Lord, they say, Portillo is throwing in the towel: "Portillo In Shock I'm History' Claim".

The great Spanish chorizo is heading for the paella of oblivion. Immense psychoanalyses are immediately commissioned, Channel 4 News shows long lingering shots of Portillo on his intellectual railway odyssey through the high sierra, buying ice cream in Spanish and looking thoughtfully at rural customs as his soul churns with contradictions.

And if he were to have said, no actually, old fruit, I am still pretty keen on being leader of the Tory party, what would we have said? Aha! we would all have yelled. So it's true. The pompadoured one still lusts for the top job. Portillo To Hague: You're toast, hombre.

Well, which is the better set of headlines? If you were Portillo, and you wanted your party to concentrate on winning the next election, you might just prefer to say no, you weren't interested. But let us take him at face value. Let us assume that a man of his mental agility could, if he so chose, find a way of saying something that produced no headlines.

Let us assume there is a grit of truth in these assertions that he is down in the dumps, and starting to consider a life outside politics. If that is true, I say, Oi, no, Michael, for pete's sake, get a grip and keep plugging away. If it is true - and I have no independent means of knowing - that Portillo is cheesed off, the cause may be partly the kind of opinions expressed by Norman Tebbit, who has denounced the touchy-feeliness in the modern Tory party.

This quality is now associated with Mr Portillo. A few people seem to think there is something basically hilarious about the new Portillo. It is, they say, as if Franco were found to have had a tattoo saying "I Love Mum" on his chest. People say that he is an ideological turncoat. They say he can't have meant "all those things" when he was the young Thatcherite messiah, and simultaneously cleave to compassionate conservatism today.

It's either one or the other, they claim: and to which I say, complete and utter bilge. As David Gore-Booth, memorably said during the Scott inquiry, half the truth can be accurate. What we have in the Portillo of today is both sides of his complicated political persona. What we had in the 1980s and 1990s was only one side. It was a true reflection of what he felt: he wanted the state off people's backs; he wanted to cut taxes; he wanted to release this country from unnecessary Euro-regulation. But it was only half the truth.

In his meditative train journeys, and his pondering on the possibilities of compassion and inclusion - words that make some of my friends weep hot tears of laughter - he is trying to do something rather important. He and his colleagues are trying falteringly to reinvent the language of One Nation Toryism. For 20 years, the Thatcherites felt that they were in an unending war with the state. One second's softness, and they feared that it would all sprout out of control. So their language was uniformly belligerent about the size of government, unremittingly hostile to spending.

Private good, public bad: that seemed to be the message. And let me hasten to say that this attitude, as a way of conditioning Whitehall attitudes to spending, was sound. The trouble was that this monomaniacal language left out two things. The first was that the Tories were spending profligately on health and welfare and education; and the second was that they never claimed credit for this spending, because nothing in their rhetoric seemed to assume that it was a good thing.

It was 1980s Tory rhetoric that was dishonest, not Portillo's today. If they really believed that spending on welfare was always a snare, then why did they allow the Budget to rise to more than £100 billion? Were they just careless? Of course it was right to want to cut welfare, to release people from the dependency trap. But it was surely also part of their assumptions that spending was necessary to help those who were at the bottom of the heap. For some reason, in spite of funnelling gazillions to the most wretched 10 per cent, Tories never talked about society's duty to the poor; they never found a language of compassion. Of course not. It would have been wet.

And the consequence, as Portillo noticed during his time in the wilderness, is that people think the Tories are all about being hard, cruel and devil-take-the-hindmost. In times of economic prosperity, that is a bad reputation to have. Of course the Tories can still be the party of deregulation, and shrinking the state; but they won't be trusted to do so, if people think their underlying objective is to destroy it. There is more chance of being able to reform and redirect the state if you acknowledge its existence and importance, a point that Peter Lilley was trying to make before he met his untimely end. Look at Blair, ruthlessly talking Right and acting Left: claiming to cut regulation while piling it on; promising to stand up to federalism, and caving in; promising to cut taxes, and then jacking them up.

Maybe the Tories would do better, and be in a position to act Right, if they began by talking Left, by explaining the minimal Tory view of the state and society. Because no one looking at the Thatcherites' spending record could be in any doubt: those people thought there was such a thing as society.